


Missing in Action

by Headline (Newsy)



Series: Headline's Chronicles [3]
Category: Transformers Generation One
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Original Character(s), POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-12-10 15:21:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/787528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Newsy/pseuds/Headline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The greatest of Cybertron embark on a perilous journey, shrouded in mystery, to parts unknown.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Missing in Action

The massive, impressively armed flagship of the Autobot fleet sat idling, its engines producing a low hum.  A group of warriors and officers gathered, Optimus Prime among them, to board the Ark and embark on an exploratory mission the details of which remained shrouded in mystery.  The caliber of the deploying fighters and the solemnity with which Ultra Magnus and Elita One looked on hinted at something more than mere exploration, but most of the remaining Autobots could only guess and speculate about the true nature of the Ark’s flight.  
  
Intimidated by the sheer potency of the assembled force and the ship itself, I approached my closest friend in the group as unobtrusively as I could.  
  
“Bye, Uncle Ratchy,” I said sadly and quietly to the Autobots’ chief medical officer.  
  
“Easy, little ladybot.”  Ratchet shook my hand with an attempt at a relaxed smile.  “It’s just an exploratory mission.  We’ll be back before the vorn is out.”  
  
“If it’s just an exploratory mission… why is Prime taking half the able-bodied Autobots on Cybertron and the flagship of the fleet?” I asked.  “And why is Prime taking the CMO?  And why is Prime _going?”_  
  
“I said _easy,”_ Ratchet interrupted me.  “Everything is just in case.  Just in case we run into some Deceptiscum on the way.  Just in case we run into somebody else who wants to try and blow us up.”  Ratchet noticed my shudder at the thought of another hostile force.  “Nothing’s going to happen.”  
  
“Headline, come on back and roll tape!” Slamdance shouted in my general direction.  
  
“On it,” I acknowledged him.  
  
“See you in half a vorn,” Ratchet said in a final attempt to reassure me.  I ran back toward Slamdance, focused and began recording the surreal scene.  One after another, many of the Autobots’ highest ranking and highest regarded warriors – Jazz, Bumblebee, Ratchet, Ironhide, Sideswipe, Sunstreaker – exchanged sharp salutes with Optimus Prime and boarded the Ark.  
  
“Do you buy this ‘just an exploratory mission’ line?” I asked Slamdance.  
  
“We’re the press, rookie,” my supervisor chuckled.  “Our job is not to buy anything anyone says.”  
  
The line of warriors continued streaming into the ship: Hound, Cliffjumper, Wheeljack, Brawn, Huffer.  I voiced my suspicions to Slamdance.  “This is too much firepower for something that’s only going to take half a vorn.”  
  
“What do you think it is, then?” Slamdance inquired.  
  
Hesitant to make a guess, I returned the question.  “Dunno.  You?”  
  
Slamdance looked grim.  “Start of an evacuation.”  
  
I nearly snapped my neck turning toward him in surprise.  “Evacuation – you mean leaving Cybertron for good?”  
  
“Or at least for a while.  Face it – the more land the ‘Cons get their greasy gauntlets on, the less we’ll have of whatever energon is left.”  
  
“But… where would we go?”  
  
“I guess that’s what they’re looking for.”  
  
I only shrugged in reply to Slamdance’s words.  With the lack of details we had, what more could I say?  
  
Prowl, Prime’s second-in-command, was the last to board the ship other than the commander himself.  He smartly saluted and strode into the Ark.  Prime stepped away from the ramp to the ship, saluted Ultra Magnus and Elita One… then broke the formal protocol for a firm handshake with Magnus and a warm embrace with Elita.  
  
“That’s not how Prime says goodbye if he’s coming back any time soon,” Slamdance observed.  I shuddered again.  
  
Without another word to anyone on the ground, Prime boarded the Ark and shut the door behind him.  The engines fired; the ship lurched forward, accelerated and lifted off the ground.  I followed its path with my camera until it appeared so small that only the blinking of control lights distinguished it from a distant star or planet.  As I watched, I wondered which of those distant stars or planets might be the Ark’s destination, whether any more of us might be joining her crew… and when, if ever, Prime and his illustrious fellow travelers would again set foot on Cybertron.  
  
***  
  
“Don’t deny it, little miss,” Firestar teased me.  “I saw you.”  
  
“You saw _nothing!”_ I protested with a laugh.  
  
“What do you think?” Firestar asked Moonracer, winking.  
  
“She was looking at him,” Moonracer teased me.  
  
“I was not!” I insisted, feigning shock.  
  
“If you weren’t looking at him,” Firestar said, waving my own discarded notepad in front of my face, “then how do you explain _this?”_  
  
I couldn’t explain it any other way, of course.  In my absent-minded doodling on my notepad, I’d sketched out a lopsided and rough version of Sunstreaker’s face.  Maddeningly vain and egotistical as he was, he did have a point when he spoke highly of his own looks.  
  
Rather than make up an explanation, I attempted to defend myself.  “Didn’t _you_ look at him before you were mated?”  
  
“Sure,” Firestar scoffed.  “And then I remembered the personality _behind_ that face.”  
  
“No comment,” Moonracer said, playfully grabbing Powerglide’s arm and pulling him into the room.  “How long have _you_ been standing there?”  
  
“It wasn’t my idea!” Powerglide said, waving his free arm in the direction of the door.  
  
“Inferno…” Firestar jokingly scolded.  
  
The larger red mech followed Powerglide into the room, shuffling his feet and looking at the floor.  “Yes, dear,” he mumbled – then picked Firestar up by the waist and swung her around until she squealed and kicked dangerously close to a sensitive spot on his housing.  
  
I laughed at my friends’ mates and at the proto-like displays of affection.  “What exactly were you two planning?” I prodded Inferno.  
  
“We just wanted to have a little fun,” he defended himself with a disarming smile.  “And maybe all of us together can talk Chromia out of her quarters.  Primus knows we haven’t had much luck on our own.”  
  
“I think that’s a job for us femmes,” Moonracer mildly rebuked the mechs.  Firestar and I followed her cue and made our way toward the quarters that Chromia had shared with Ironhide for vorns.  
  
Firestar knocked lightly on Chromia’s door, breaking the melancholy quiet in the corridor.  “Chromes?” she called softly.  “You in there?”  
  
“It’s just us,” I added.  
  
“Thought you might want a little company,” Moonracer said.  
  
The door slid slowly open to reveal dim lighting inside Chromia’s lonely quarters.  The pale blue femme said nothing as she waved us in.  Her movements were slow, as though she had not consumed any energon for the entire orn since Ironhide had departed aboard the Ark.  
  
“Primus, lady, _fuel up_ already,” Firestar urged her.  
  
“I’ve tried,” Chromia said in a voice barely above a whisper.  “But I’m… my system’s all in knots.”  
  
“He’s been gone before, Chromes,” Firestar said.  “All our mechs’ve been gone before.  _We’ve_ all been gone before.  They’ve always come back, we’ve always come back.  He’ll be _fine.”_ She pointed to the nearly complete energon ration on the small table next to the bunk.  “Now get that in your system.”  
  
“I _know_ he’s been gone before.”  Chromia’s voice grew in volume as she began to pace back and forth in front of the bunk.  “But… he’s always known where he’s going.  Sometimes he’ll say he can’t tell me – he’s _never_ told me he _doesn’t know.”_  
  
“So don’t worry until you _know_ something,” Moonracer said, grabbing Chromia by the shoulders and forcing her to sit down.  “It’s not doing you any good.  I mean, look at you.”  She firmly placed the energon ration in Chromia’s hand.  “Now eat.  You don’t want to make Firey mad, do you?”  
  
For the first time since we’d entered her quarters, Chromia smiled.  “That’s too dangerous to argue with,” she conceded just before hungrily downing the ration.  “Hey… thanks for snapping me out of it.  I don’t know what I’d do without you girls.”  
  
Moonracer shrugged off the compliment.  “Nothing you haven’t done for us.”  
  
Another knock sounded on Chromia’s door.  “Chromia – priority one,” the somber voice of Elita One greeted her.  
  
“Oh, no,” Chromia gasped.  A priority-one personal visit from a supreme commander, or in this case acting supreme commander, never brought good news – either word of a deployment, or word of a loss.  
  
The door automatically opened for Elita’s security clearance, and all four of us snapped sharply to attention.  “As you were,” Elita One dismissed us, waving to signal all but Chromia to back out of the room for a few kliks.  
  
Moonracer, Firestar and I clumped nervously across the corridor, watching as well as we could through the small window in the door of Chromia and Ironhide’s shared quarters.  The words the blue and pink femmes exchanged were too quiet to reach our aurals, but the meaning was ominously clear.  Chromia covered her mouth with her hand and almost collapsed into a seated position on her bunk; Elita grasped her other hand in sympathy.  
  
Elita departed without a word to any of us.  With Firestar in the lead, we rushed back into Chromia’s quarters.  “What’s going on?” the red femme asked.  
  
Chromia kept her head lowered, unable to make optical contact with any of us.  “They’re missing,” she moaned.  
  
“They who?” Firestar pressed her.  
  
“Ironhide… Ironhide and everyone,” Chromia answered, her voice low and mournful.  “The Ark – Prime, Prowl, Ratchet, _everyone_ – they’re just… gone.”  
  
“Maybe they just lost communication range,” Moonracer said hopefully.  
  
Chromia shook her head.  “The last they heard – Jazz was saying something about… there were Decepticons, and they boarded, and… then nothing.”  
  
Chromia slumped with her head in her hands.  I quietly sat to her right on the bunk and draped my arm over her shoulders, and Moonracer mirrored me at Chromia’s left.  Firestar knelt in front of her and rested one hand on her knee.  “We got ya, Chromes,” she said.  “We got ya.”  
  
Yet another commotion clattered on the other side of the door.  The frenzied knocking and concerned voices gave the culprits away as Powerglide and Inferno.  “You want we should get rid of the boys?” Moonracer gently asked.  “We’ll distract ‘em for a while.  Headline’ll stay with you, won’t you, Headline?”  I nodded quickly in the affirmative.  
  
“Yeah,” Chromia mumbled.  “Thanks, ‘Racer, Firey.”  She raised her head slightly and glanced at me.  “You too, fresh oil.  Go write about this.”  
  
I shook my head and patted Chromia on the shoulder.  “Slam can get it.”  The older femme managed a smile and leaned heavily against me for support.  
  
First Inferno, then Powerglide peeked into the room to offer silent expressions of support before their femmes practically shoved them back into the corridor.  Their departure left Chromia and me alone in the quarters that were also home to Ironhide… if he was ever _coming_ home.  
  
“Be glad you’re not mated, fresh oil,” Chromia sighed.  “Long as you’re not mated, this’ll never happen to you.”  
  
I looked around and saw a scattered collection of still images accenting the walls of the mostly ascetic quarters.  Every image was a portrait, either of Chromia, of Ironhide or of the two of them together.  Noticing that one nearby image of Ironhide was slightly off-kilter, I reached over to straighten it with one hand while keeping my other arm around Chromia’s shoulders.  
  
Many times, Ironhide or Chromia had been deployed somewhere distant from Iacon in the fight to reclaim land from the Decepticons, and the other had been left behind to protect the Autobots’ central city… and to worry.  Many times, Firestar and Inferno had suffered the same trial, as had Moonracer and Powerglide, as had Elita One and Optimus Prime.  Through each of those deployments, they had remained focused, unwavering and even optimistic in their own ways.  I wondered how Elita and Chromia would cope now, with no definitive return date for the mechs they loved and no guarantee a return date even existed, and I wondered if I would ever have the strength of Spark to endure anything similar.  
  
“Is he worth it, though?” I asked, finally responding to Chromia’s words.  
  
She raised her head and looked at the portrait of Ironhide as I pulled my hand away from it.  Her optics were sorrowful and dim, yet resolute.  
  
“He is,” she replied.

**Author's Note:**

> Original character Headline created by the author. Other characters, as well as Transformers itself, are the property of Hasbro and are used for non-profitable entertainment purposes only.


End file.
